Tag Archives: alert

Remember the days when people communicated by wire and by post? We’ve come a long way since then, since the advent of the Internet brought about near-instant ways to send notes and messages, such as through email and SMS. Call me old-fashioned, but nothing quite beats receiving a letter in the mail. There’s just something about reading someone’s message from a handwritten letter versus an email on the browser window.

The only snail mail that most people get these days are bills and catalogs. For that reason, most people I know don’t really check their mailboxes often. However, you can change what you receive in the post by sending letters and postcards out first to friends and family from other states and continents. Wait a while, and your mailbox will be filled with letters once more. And so you won’t needlessly check your mailbox anymore, you can install the Postifier.

It’s pretty frustrating to click on a link, only to be redirected to a 404 error page because the link is broken. But there’s a new initiative in cybertown called the NotFound Project that has come up with a better way to handle these pages. Instead of displaying the usual 404 error when a page can’t be found, participating sites that have installed the module from the project will display a missing child alert instead. The alerts are cycled so a different one is shown for every error, with the profiles for the missing children pulled from a constantly-updated database.

The NotFound Project was set up by Missing Children Europe in collaboration with Child Focus. It only profiles kids who’ve gone missing in the European Union for now, but it would be interesting (not to mention beneficial for the whole world) if they turned this into a global endeavor.

Earthquakes are scary. I was home and all alone when a 7.4 magnitude quake hit recently, so needless to say, I was a little freaked out. I tried calling my sisters and my mom, but it appeared that the phone lines were temporarily down. So instead, I went online and sure enough, a handful of my friends had already tweeted about the earthquake.

It’s probably similar situations like this that prompted seismologists to say that Twitter does a better job at ‘detecting’ earthquakes and tremors all around the world versus their own advanced equipment. This is because the tweets are posted in real-time to report the quakes as they happen, while their machines would probably still be working to pinpoint where and when the quakes had taken place.

It is for this reason that the US Geological Survey is using Twitter as an early-warning system so they can quickly gather and put together reports of earthquakes as they happen.

Paul Caruso, from the US Geological Survery, explained: “We do have sensors and it usually takes about five minutes before the sensors will see the earthquake. With this earthquake it was the case that Ted warnings that people were tweeting that they felt an earthquake actually came in before our seismometers actually registered it.”

Now this is definitely one use for Twitter that has the potential to save a whole lot of lives.

OhGizmo! is a frequently updated blog that focuses on covering items that will appeal to a very specific and often very passionate audience: the geek. Aside from the fare of innovative consumer electronic products, the reader can expect to find news about geek culture, absurd inventions, awe inspiring technology, and an ever growing assortment of articles that we like to think fit within our view of what we’re calling the Geek Lifestyle.